“If you do something radical, like saying, 'Let’s put a woman on currency’ – which is like the penis of society,” Wolf says with a laugh, “then you should be prepared for this kind of abuse. What will keep us failing is saying, 'Let’s change the world,’ but then, the minute it gets difficult, going back into the parlour and asking people to feel sorry for us.

"You need to know what to do when you stir up s—; you need to figure out what’s next. But what’s next is not silence, not boycotting or withdrawing. We need to learn how to lean into this, and push back and push harder.”

You certainly can’t accuse Wolf of not living by her own advice. Warm, open and quick to laugh though she is in person, she has made a career out of being contrary, from the moment she was anointed the glamorous new voice of feminism two decades ago with her debut book, The Beauty Myth.

Now 50, she’s not retreating anywhere: next month she will be in London for Superpower Weekend at the Southbank Centre, discussing political activism in late 20th-century America (the event is part of a year-long cultural and political festival called The Rest is Noise). “I wish I was ever asked to talk about it in my own country,” she notes with a wry smile, adding that Britain feels “more and more like home these days”.

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In her talk she will discuss how she believes American and British society has become apathetic, taking freedom for granted. “We are seeing all sorts of civil liberties being infringed: increasing surveillance, attempts by the British government to get rid of the Human Rights Act…” she tells me. Although it may seem that she’s veering off into new territory, feminism and human rights are, to her, very much related.

“Feminism is not a separate cult, it’s a logical extension of democracy. It is just women being free to be whatever they are, whether you agree with them or not.”

And plenty have disagreed with her, not least within the feminist movement itself. Published in 1991 when Wolf was not yet 30, The Beauty Myth posited the theory that women had gained greater social and financial power but become bound by standards of beauty even more restrictive than in previous, supposedly un-liberated generations. It became a bestseller and Wolf was catapulted into the spotlight in a way few feminists had been since Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch 20 years earlier.

“People think of it now as a classic text, but at the time there was some very violent hostility. I felt like I was in the middle of an earthquake,” says Wolf. While Greer and Gloria Steinem heaped praise on the book, other prominent feminists – notably Camille Paglia, who claimed it was “completely removed from reality” – were “up in arms. I thought my career was over before it had even started.

"But I think that kind of baptism by fire is one of the things that deters young women from writing what they believe. And I think it is an important thing to train young women to cope with, because it comes with the territory, especially if you are trying to change things.”

This is spoken with the luxury of hindsight; at the time, she recalls, she phoned her grandmother, saying she’d never write again. She soon changed her mind, of course. Subsequent books included Promiscuities, which urged women to “reclaim the slut” within, and Misconceptions, a critique of attitudes to pregnancy and birth, which drew on her experiences as mother to Rosa, now 18, and Joey, 15. (She divorced their father, a New York Times journalist, in 2005.)

Wolf with her parents in 1991, the year The Beauty Myth was published

Neither book, however, provoked quite the reaction that Vagina: A New Biography did. Published last year, it proposed a connection between the female sexual organs and the brain that affects consciousness, creativity and confidence. Reviews from fellow feminists and the mainstream media were among the most savage and personal of her career.

“But the reason I was serene in the midst of some extremely hostile criticism is that it is exactly the same language that was aimed at me with The Beauty Myth,” she insists. “When I began writing The Beauty Myth I was 26; the average 26-year-old woman I meet now is light years more empowered than her counterpart was in 1991. That doesn’t mean they escape the problems, but it does mean they know they are allowed to question them and complain and resist.”

Back then she argued that while women had “breached the power structure”, eating disorders, plastic surgery and the use of pornography had grown exponentially. This was before Botox became a lunchtime treat and Brazilian waxes an accepted part of grooming. However Wolf – who, for the record, arrives at our interview make-up free, glowing and with still-damp hair – believes that we aren’t going to hell in a handcart quite yet.

“I think that there are many kinds of feminism, with many voices, that are alive and well,” she says. “And I wish that feminists of my generation, and the generation older than me, would recognise that it is everywhere among young women – it just doesn’t always look the way they think it should look. It’s better in some ways – it’s more diverse, more aware of racism, class issues, capitalism and economic pressures.”

She admits to not having read Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, but comments that “the mistake women make decade after decade is thinking that if we just make the case well enough, or knuckle down and work harder, things will change. They won’t.”

She rates highly Caitlin Moran’s book How To Be A Woman, describing it as “fabulous. Humour is a way to talk about serious and important issues like equity and justice with a gentle touch. People can’t take that much being hit over the head.” (It should perhaps be noted that Wolf has herself been described as “over earnest” and “po-faced” by her critics.)

Wolf with her daughter, Rosa, in 2005 (Getty)

The daughter of Jewish academics, whom she describes as bohemians, Wolf was brought up to be unafraid to voice her opinions. “My parents always listened to me – they didn’t always agree with me, but they always treated everything I had to say respectfully,” she says. “My dad would say, 'I expect you to be able to do whatever you want to do, and I don’t expect you to let anything stop you.’ And I remember my mom saying, 'Don’t be a victim.’

“I grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, where everything was being broken open, and personal freedom was the byword. You’d see people coming from all over the country, all shut down and suppressed, and then they would proclaim themselves as a transgender watercolourist, and be these transformed human beings. My brother and I were definitely raised with the value system that we should do whatever we wanted, if we were really following our bliss, as long as it was not about money or convention or social status.”

While no one could argue with her intellect (she read English at Yale, where she won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, with the intention of following her parents into academia), I can’t help wondering whether it is this West Coast bohemianism with its talk of “bliss” that in part provokes her detractors, some of whom dismiss her as chatty and lightweight. When she talks about her 2011 arrest, for instance, she says, “The thing about freedom is that it feels a certain way, it is a physical feeling – just as incarceration or suppression is a physical feeling – and a spiritual feeling, and an emotional feeling.”

Wrongly reported at the time as being part of the Occupy protests taking place in lower Manhattan, Wolf was arrested after she stopped to give advice to a small group of fracking protestors. “I had this very nerdy chapter in one of my books on NYC permit law, about who owns the sidewalks,” says Wolf. “The people of New York own the sidewalks and it is really important. You have to be able to protest right up at the gates.”

When Wolf joined the protest and refused to back down, she was handcuffed, along with her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, and thrown into a police van. She becomes emotional at the retelling of the story. “I’m sorry – it was scary,” she says with a shudder. “It was very traumatic.” In separate cells, she and Ludwig were threatened with charges of incitement to riot and with 15 days in the notorious Rikers Island prison – neither of which, mercifully, materialised. “But what happened to me is very minor compared to what happens to many other people.” She shakes her head. “In Oakland people were shot in the head and injured; in LA people were kept in cuffs for 12 hours. It was like Iran in Southern California.”

Wolf is currently spending a lot of time in Oxford, finishing the doctorate she began in the 1980s (about the invention of the obscenity law and homosexuality as a crime in 19th-century Britain) before she was diverted by The Beauty Myth. For all society’s progress since that book’s publication, there is much that has got worse, she believes, and her views are coloured by her perspective as the mother of teenage children. “I worry about the young not having an inner life that is private, and I worry about surveillance technologies and porn colonising consciousness,” she says.

Pornography is one of her biggest concerns. “Now, everyone learns about sex through pornography, everyone masturbates to pornography – men and women – and the sense that you have to look a certain way to be sexual is much greater than it used to be.”

Wolf was one of the first, in The Beauty Myth, to touch on the effect that this surfeit of sexualised imagery can have upon libido and sexual response. In a 2003 essay for New York magazine she noted that therapists and sex counsellors were seeing a correlation between the rise in porn use among young men and the rise in impotency and other sexual dysfunction. It’s now considered received wisdom among social scientists and neuroscientists, and even in the mainstream media.

“I wish I were wrong,” Wolf says, shaking her head. “But I just saw a new statistic that one in four men consulting doctors about erectile dysfunction are under 40. That is directly related to porn.”

Sad though it makes her, the belated vindication of Wolf’s early theories about porn give her hope that the same may happen with Vagina. “I know this is going to be conventional wisdom in five years,” she says, and points to research being done at Rutgers University into the connection between female sexual pleasure and creativity and confidence. Of everything, confidence is not something you could accuse her of lacking.

“My dad taught me my whole life, 'It is none of your business what they say about you. Your job is to make it as true and solid and well reasoned and beautifully written as you can.’”